Yes, I was on vacation for a few weeks. Since I returned I have watched documentaries and warmovies. But, now you asked for it, I'll give you one review from before my vacation:

Lord of Illusions - a good film, Clive Barker cuts it with this story. It is actually nice to see it develop, from a bit vague into an ever clearer picture. When you find out what is going on, you'll smile. Nice pace, good music, too. The effects are pretty impressive. I kept looking for goofs but couldn't find one. If you like your horrormovies with a good storyline and some character building, this one is for you. Don't come and look for a lot of gore, there is but a few. Recommended.


More will follow as soon as I pick up watching horror again

Source Code (2011): This is a kind of time travel movie, but it's not real time travel. A soldier participates in a new military program. The technology enables scientists to put a person into the mind of another person in the past for 8 minutes. The soldier is sent back several times to locate the bomber on a train. I liked the basic idea of this one. The story was original and the acting was decent. However I thought that too much time was spent on details that weren't that important. Not highly recommended, but it is okay to watch if there is nothing else on.

Legion (1998): I was positively surprised by this one. I was expecting a cheap Alien rip-off. While the plot is similar I really liked this one. A team of soldiers is sent to a space ship to take it over. What they find is a lot of dead people. Then they are hunted down by a killer creature one by one. The actors were nice and all their characters were interesting. I think the ending was a bit over the top. It was too happy.

Primer (2004): Another time travel movie. A couple of friends are building a machine in their garage. They find out that the machine can be used to travel back in time. They used it to make money but soon it turns out that they are not trusting each other and nothing is what it seems. This is a real low budget movie. No special effects. Just simple and solid acting. I had no subtitles and sometimes it was hard for me to understand the American dialogue. For this reason I was lost at the 3/4 of this movie. I had to look up explanations on the web. If you like confusing time travel movies, you are going to like this one.

Stay Alive (2005): In this video game horror movie the gamers are killed in the same way they die in a video game called "Stay Alive". The video game is about a mansion occupied by the Blood Countess in the style of Resident Evil. The characters in the movie were kind of funny and this added to the movie imho. While this was not a good movie at all, I really enjoyed it. The killings were quite bloody.

I really enjoyed both Source Code and Primer, a hint with Primer is to watch their ties!

They are wearing a different colour / pattern depending on which "version" of themselves they are - but it is a DAMN confusing film!!

The Lost Empire - I thought this would be a fantasy flick, but it turned out more to be an action movie with some weird elements best descibed as scifi-ish. Some ancient spirit lives inside a man who set up an empire on a Pacific island where he lures trios of young women, so they can serve him after they have been brainwashed. A female cop wants to go look for him, because he is after some precious stones with which he can make an ueberweapon in order to control the world. This film was really funny to watch, as there are a lot of mistakes (the evil lord's bald sidekick has big fake eyebrows in the first scene - in the second scene, right after someone has made a joke on them, they have disappeared. Later they return, just to be there some of the time) and big breasted women. They go naked too, and all the other time they are wearing funky costumes which are totally unfit for fighting, yet they keep doing so. There are some jokes (at least I hope they were jokes) and the ending is incredibly cheesy. Oh, and the weapon: you should see it, otherwise you won't believe me, but it looks like a giant dick with balls. A feast for bad moviefans! I've ripped this baby recently, and I'll share it within a few weeks. Highly recommended for bad moviefans!

Track of the Moonbeast - I knew this title from a Night of Bad Taste, so I sat down full of expectations for a supercheesy bad movie. And it was. OMG. This movie was so superbad that it immediately entered my top 5 of worst movies ever, it is there among such titles as Troll 2 and Manos Hands of Fate. Where to begin? Well, the storyline doesn't make sense: a guy gets a chip of meteorite in his brain and then starts to turn into a monster everytime there is a moon. The monster looks like some sort of reptilicus, the filmmakers didn't succeed really in making it look like a lizard. This movie too is full of really bad stuff. The camerawork is extremely bad: in key scenes (like in the first killing), the camera turns away from the action, you cans ee the first victim for a few frames only, then he falls down. Then comes the terribnle editing: instead of zooming in on his face, the next scene starts! So you don't really get a good view of the gore. Then, goofy mistakes: the wife of the first victim is really colossal, but when there are two stretchers with the bodies (the wife appraently died of a heart attack), one is almost flat while the other is kind of bulky. Well, who is the person on the bulky stretcher? The man, not the wife! Acting is bad to so-so, with the main actor facepalming every other second and the main actress being very clumsy, she often misses a doorgrip and she even misskisses the main character in a romantic scene. I could go on and on, but I suggest you wait a little while, as I'll rip this gem in a short while and then put it up for share. A MUST SEE for bad moviefans!

Lost Boys 2: The Tribe (2008): The sequel to the vampire movie starring Corey Feldman and Kiefer Sutherland. Despite Corey Feldman's character the plot has nothing to do with part one. The movie is of course as to be expected nowhere near as good as part one. At least it was funny and jokes were alright. The story is similar to part one. Two siblings get into a new town and get in contact with a local vampire tribe. Not really recommended.

Auntie Lee's Meat Pies (1992): This is one wonderful SBiG horror comedy. It has nice looking chicks lurking horny guys into a house. There they are murdered and you guessed it make the secret ingredient for some famous meat pies. The only bad thing about the movie is that it is quite flat. It is the same thing trough the entire movie. People get killed. There is even no real ending. Just the sheriff getting killed. Oh I almost forgot: watch out for Mr. Miagi from Karate Kid as the sheriff.

The Seventh Sign (1988): This movie is about the apocalypse. It has quite a lot bible topics and history covered. Which is interesting if you are into religion. Demi Moore is the lead in this one. The signs of the apocalypse are showing up and she has to save the world from damnation. The movie for some reason felt boring. There was almost no action and no suspense. A very forgettable movie.

The Signal (2007): WTF was this? It began with a kind of retro footage of a stupid old horror movie, then the following 20 minutes it was great. Suspensful and interesting. Then it became a comedy (wtf?) and in the last act it was something between horror and comedy. I looked the movie up on IMDb and it seems they had a budget of 50.000 USD. Watching the movie I can't see anything that would indicate such a small budget. The actors are great. But the story. Holy shit, this was bad. In the end I thought I was watching a comedy but IMDb says it is not. The disc with the movie immediately landed in the trash bin after I had watched it.

The Signal is that movie with the couple who move to Japan, right? With the photographer? I thought the story was trying too hard, the ending was quite original, though. Not that feel good shite you'd expect.

No, that must be a different movie. This one is about a couple (well it is a wife and his lover with whom she is cheating her husband) in a city called Terminus.

Yup, got some titles mixed up.

Back to watching horror and related stuff. I must say, I ever had such a long break from horror before and it certainly feels good to be back

Flesh, Tx - pretty cleche rednecksploitation with a family who eat people. The beautiful daughter (she is so so imo) lures preferably fat men into the house and then they get killed and eaten for supper. Lame jokes about this are repeated over and over again, like: "we have guests for supper". Ha. Ha. Ha. A woman and her daughter enter the town and then the daughter gets kidnapped by the cannibal family. What follows is a search by the mother, which ends in a very predictable way. Skip this and go for a better film if you want to watch rednecksploitation.

Soldier - I sort of recognised the intro of this film. I had seen the scene where Kurt Russell shoots a hostage and the hostage taker before, but I'm not sure about the rest of the film. I used to link this scene to Starship Troopers, but apparently I was wrong there. The story is pretty classic: extremely trained supersoldier turns against his boss. For this he gets help from people who live on a garbage dump planet. The fight gets it's climax in a duel between Kurt Russell and his nemesis from the beginning of the film. Also very classic. Nice scifi story, but far from original. Well made though, therefore recommended.

Sucker Punch - a lot. There is a lot going on in this film. I'm not sure whether I think this is overrated or a masterpiece. The storyline is quite interesting and original, it is easy to follow even for those who don't know anything about it in advance (like me). The stories within the stories are very much over the top, it is superspectacular for the eyes, but the mind isn't pleased so much in these, it will have to resort to the overall storyline to get some satisfaction. The overusing of cgi was a bit painful to watch, even though the quality was quite good. Some of the fighting scenes reminded of LOTR Two Towers for some reason (atmosphere, colouring). About the ending I'm not so sure. On one hand this was cliche and playing on your emotions in a cheap way, but on the other hand one can see this as masterful, concluding the film in style. I'm on the fence on this one. I'll recommend it because even if it isn't a masterpiece, it is a spectacular movie to watch with some nice chicks.

VLOG - there are two parts to this movie and they are separated by a warning which announces some graphical violence somewhere around the 40 minute mark. Before this warning, all you get to see is a girl who talks into the camera and it is REALLY uninteresting!! After the warning, tension starts to rise and if you are open enough to it, you can even get scared a bit by this part. There is indeed some graphic violence and it is not only what you see, but especially what you hear that might make you cringe. The ending turned out to be a surprise for me, even though it has been done before. I didn't see it coming. Nicely done. Recommended.

The Dead - this zombie story is set in Africa and there is no explanation as to why there are zombies around, like in Dawn of the Dead for example. The story turns out to be some sort of a roadmovie where an African soldier and an American engineer become friends. Their trip is supposed to end in a military base where they want to find the son of the soldier. Of course the trip is dangerous because there are zombies everywhere. Beautifully shot, this film is a viewing pleasure for all. The landscape is used to make you feel desolate, but it is also breathtaking to watch. The ending is quite ambiguous, but I thought it was pretty OK. Recommended!

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City - kind of a classic adventure story taking place in the 1860s. Some shipwrecked people get rescued by inhabitants of an underwater city, led by Nemo. Although the city seems a paradise, some of the new arrivals would like to return to their homes, but they aren't allowed to leave. What follows is a series of attempts, a love story and a happy ending. Quite boring, actually.

Stonehenge Apocalypse - made for TV film, and for a Syfy movie this is quite bearable. But you have to take into account that my standards for Syfy movies are considerably lower than for any other films. In this film Stonehenge is moving around in circles (the stones make circular movements) and a reporter who used to be a scientist is trying to find out why. Of course the governemtn and the military are on it too and soon a worldwide network of electromagnetic lines is discovered. When pyramids across the globe start to erupt like volcanoes, they have to act fast to prevent the destruction of the planet. This could have been an extended episode of X-files, although it wasn't equally clever. Also, an overdose of cgi. But, way better than usual from Syfy.

Horrid - yes, good title. This film is indeed horrid. A bunch of guys who think they can act, a totally dumb storyline, no zombies for 50 minutes and really fake looking make up make the 91 minute journey a terrible odyssea. Skip it!

Invaders from Mars - some scifi fun from the 50s with a lot of "Oh noes!" moments. Some evil aliens are trying to mind control people and a little boy who is losing his parents to the aliens this way is doing all he can to get them back. Effects are laughable and there is a lot of repetition in the military sequences (tanks launching the same shell over and over again). I laughed a lot. Recommended for bad moviefans.

Poor Pretty Eddie - weird film about a TV celebrity whose car breaks down and has to seek shelter in the home of a bunch of stange folks: a fat lady, an Elvis impersonator and a slow giant. It is nice to see how the Elvis impersonator keeps trying to be nice to the TV celeb while she keeps rejecting him and insisting on getting away. He however keeps trying to court her, even though the fat lady tries to seduce him and make him stop going after the TV celeb. On some points I thought it was a bit too much (when the TV celeb tries to get away a few times, she is always caught and sometimes it is in an unbelievable way), but in the end this turns out to be a nice rape/revenge film. Recommended.

Hell Comes to Frogtown - for the first 30-40 minutes I was thinking why this wasn't called
Hell Comes to F*cktown, because all the characters are speaking of, is having sex to procreate mankind. But after that, the frogpeople come in (they are frogs and toads alike) and we get to see some fighting action. There is some funny stuff, like the crotchlock Sam Hell (the main character) is wearing. It all ends with a lame oneliner. So, some nice and mindless campy fun.

Swamp Shark - gather all your cliches ogether and put them in a film, or "how conceptual can you go?". This monsterflick has it all, the strange monster, the corrupt sheriff, the annual festival which cannot be cancelled, the monster attacking said festival, etc. What was kind of original was the casting of not so superthin women, some of them were a little chubby (nothing too much, though). Some mindless fun, you can do somethign else while watching as it is so simple.

Robotropolis - again, a lot of cliches. A company builds robots for every purpose and they want the entire world to be run by robots. But then an incident happens, someone gets killed by a robot (this is a cool scene btw) and a newscrew who was reporting on the robots now has to find their way out of the town which is nfested with robots. The media thingy is also important in this fim, it has some kind of a Wag the Dog feeling to it, but of course not nearly as well done as that movie. The robots are all cgi and some of it looks really great, while other stuff looks superbad. I wonder how they could make two types of cgi looking so much different. The film runs for 80 minutes but it feels a lot longer. The ending sucks.

Friday Foster - nice blaxploitation film with Pam Grier again in the main role, only not being an angel of revenge this time. Yes, she does seek out a criminal who killed her friend and yes, she has to do a lot of ouh la la stuff to get to it, but this film is a bit different from the other blaxploitations I have seen. It is a little less rough, sweeter somehow. Music great as always.

Slime City Massacre - I had filed this under zombies, but it isn't really a zombieflick. I was afraid that it might be superdumb as I saw Lloyd Kaufmann in the opening credits, but luckily he had only a cameo. Debbie Rochon is in this one again, like in so many other B-movies. In slime city, people drink some sort of homebrew elixer and then they get horny. While having sex, they start to produce slime (pink for women, green and blue for men). After that they start attacking people. It was all very weird and it was hard to follow the storyline, if there was any. Some soldiers come in to destroy the slimepeople, and in the end there is some dumb scene with coloured brains. Weird.

Sigma Die - sorority house massacre, this one was filled to the brim with cliches again. Strict housekeeper goes away fro a few day, girls do stuff like ouija and inviting boys are over (which isn't allowed, uh-oh) and then the killing starts. The police are baffled and the kilelr turns out to be someone you know. Wow, it has only been done a few dozen times before! Fun thing is the cast, with some well known names as Joe Estevez, Reggie Bannister and Brinke Stevens.

Goliath Against the Giants - if you have ever seen a Hercules film, you know what you can expect. Goliath is a Hercules, just with another name (maybe competing filmstudios?) and he can also fight against 50 enemies at the same time while liberating a country from it's dictator and decapitating a huge iguana. Story is OK-ish, title is quite odd because Goliath fights the giants (who aremn't so big, btw) for only a few minutes. The dictator is of course extra brutal and the woman who has to kill Goliath falls in love with him. So, this film has it all

Battle New York Day 2 - wheelshaped machines are sent down to the earth by aliens and they eliminate almost all huimans, except the ones who have hallucinations. These find each other and try to survive amidst a fight against zombies who are sent by an "alpha", because there can be only one "alpha" and the hallucinations group also has an "alpha" in their midst. Needlessly complicated, this very simple story. Overuse of cgi where even the blood is looking superugly. Can't recommend this to anyone.

Bug Buster - lots of bugs, some very nice gore and a young Katherine Heigl make this worthwhile to watch. It has a bit of a campy atmosphere, it smells a bit like the 80s, but nothing too much or exaggerated. Katherine plays a girl with a phobia for bugs, and her family just moved out to a lodge next to a lake in a somewhat remote village. This lake was the scene of a death 10 years ago, and now trouble seems yo have returned. Bugs appear everywhere and they procreate inside humans, killing them and leaving only gory corpses. A TV adverstising guy, General George, comes to the rescue. I really liked this film, because of abovementioned features. Recommended.

Die-Ner (Get It?) - a serial killer kills the crew of a diner and after that is looking for more victims, maybe the next visitors? They look like they can cooperate, but they start giving trouble soon, so the killer ties them to a barstool. But in the meantime, the dead crew become zombies, and the killer now needs the help of his former victims to control this new menace. This one was funny at times (there were some witty remarks and some fun stuff), but could also be very boring when a long monologue started. Campy, but OK enough.

Don't Look Up - it is such a shame that cgi is so widely (mis) used these days. This film fore example, is a pretty nice setup for a chilling story, but all the sfx are cgi in a way it shows, and that is a total bummer for me. The movie (cool title by the way, sounds a bit spoofy) is set in Romania, where a director who has visions all the time, is gonna finish a movie which was once started in the 1930s by a director who disappeared completely with his crew. The film was about a murdered gypsy girl. She keeps appearing on the videotape the crew is shooting, and there are accidents, quite many of them. At some point the crew leaves out of fear, but the director holds on. Then he finds out stuff which is quite spooky. Atmosphere was good in this one, it felt a bit chilly all the time they were filming in that old barn. Acting was OK too. Just that cgi... Recommended anyway.

Orcs! - pretty plain monsterfilm in which you don't get to see many orc action until right before the end. The parc rangers are quite funny, the main character reminded me of Sgt Oddball, which is a good thing. There is a nice "last stand" scene in this one, and a classic ending. I laughed a few times, good fun.

Bloodwood Cannibals - film shot with poor video quality. Story is about TV filmcrew who want to shoot some supernatural stuff. Then they encounter a girl who bites and then they start searching for the cannibal family. A long trip through the backwoods ensues and the family is met soemwhere deep inside. From that moment on, it is a hunt for humans instead of cannibals. Quite nice development of the storyline, ending is cool. Still, there is too much dumbness in this film to deserve a recommendation.

Dylan Dog, dead of night - comic film about guy who first protected all monsters and now has to hunt them down because one of them stole an artefact with which he can summon Belial. Fast paced action with vampires, werewolves, zombies and the like. Some funny stuff, especially about how to live as a zombie. Cgi all around, but quality of it is OK. End felt quite sudden. OK film though, you might have fun watching it.

Defcon 2012 - I still can't believe I sat through this. This was so terribly bad, I was wondering sometimes if maybe audio was out of sync by 5 minutes or something. If there was a storyline, I couldn't follow it. The first 10 minutes are cgi only, after that we see some people running around, sometimes they are armed. And we get a voice over all the time, telling us stuff which doesn't make sense when you try to link it to the video footage. There is one guy there who has a cgi helmet, and it keeps wiggling all the time, making it look extra fake. Maybe the crew wanted to be "experimental" or "arty", but this one just failed big time. When it was finished I thought I had see 2012: A Space Odyssey extended edition without HAL for 8 hours, while this flick luckily only lasted 1 hour and 12 mins. Run away from this crap!

Legacy Of Satan - vague 70s flick about satanist cult. Short film, so story is also short: woman gets sort of possessed, she gets her husband to visit a costume party where the host is of course the leader of the cult. They get drugged and then she is to become the new satanist queen, but all of a sudden the husband is there with a magic sword (huh? yes, I thought the same) and he wounds the cultleader. Then there a re aa few more scenes, but they are not so important. The end. I laughed out loud a few times, especially at the sword wielding scene.

Rubber - weird and absurdist movie, but in a good way, I liked it a lot. The monster in this film is a tire. It telepathically kills rabbits, spiders, and, finally, also people. There is weird stuff going on like the group of spectators in the desert, the totally weird sidestories come together in cool ways (the crow and the pizza for example). I'd like tow rite more, but I should just say: watch it, you will laugh. Wings Hauser is even in this one, playing an oldtimer in a wheelchair. Highly recommended!

Cowboys and Zombies - mmm, mediocre. Bad cgi, OK-ish story which takes a very predictable twist, badly made up zombies, long drawn scenes with chasings, shootings, etc. I wonder if this was an asylum film, riding on "Cowboys and Aliens". The ending is quite sudden and where it stops is not logical, at least to me. You won't miss anything if you skip this one.

Body Melt (1993): This movie is about a drug that gets out of control. As the movie is Austrialian I didn't understand everything they said. So I can't tell what the drug should have done, but what it did was "body melt". 1993 so no CGI! Hurray, great gore effects and head explosions. Some weird side stories. I think it is a movie which you either hate or love. It is just too strange. But I liked it.

No Country For Old Men (2007): Someone suggested this movie to me. It is not a horror movie! It is a thriller about a psychic killer in 1980s Texas. I really liked the whole movie. It's not your typical good vs. bad movie. It is rather about the brutal life and greed of people. The story in short: a hunter finds a lot of money in the wilderness. He takes it and is then hunted by drug dealers that want the money and the awesome psychic bad guy. There are probably 2 scenes that I will not forget (1) the coin toss scene at the gas station and (2) the shooting between Anton and Llewelyn in the hotel at night. There are some really nice and suspenseful scenes. Highly recommended!

Savage County - teenagers trespass, and in an accident someone gets killed. But this someone has family, and the family is bound to punish those who killed their relative. The family is a TCM-like family, rednecksploitation and all. The teenagers are trying to elude them and the police too. In the meantime, the family catches the only teenager who wasn't p[resent at the scene of the killing before, and they torture her. Well, the rest of the movie can be guessed, although I guessed wrong on the number of survivors. All in all not very original, and the quality of the rip was poor.

Alien Hunter - a satellite picks up something solid underground on Antarctica. When it gets dug up, a scientist is flown in to try and communicate with it, as it is sending out signals. Nice scifi flick, with some attempts at personal stuff intertwining with the main storyline. It doesn't really get off there, but OK. I always wonder how science teams have these nice looking women in their companies: here there are 5 women workimng and 4 of them look nice. That is 80%. At my work I don't even get to 5%! Well, enough on that, back to the film. I enjoyed it, but there is also some dumb stuff in this, like the character of Rome's love rival, ugh. I know you're supposed to dislike him, but that can be done different, you know. The ending is cheesy. I recommend watching this until there is like 10 minutes to go.

Btw: now that is a while ago since I watched Sucker Punch, it has settled in my brain and I'm leaning towards the "it is a great film"-side. So I'm recommending it now.